Sustainable Land Conservation and Mining Practices

1. Wilderness areas • Wild or primitive portions of national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges where little to no human activity occurs • Wilderness Act created National Wilderness Preservation System • Encompasses a wide variety of ecosystems throughout the country

2. Land Conservation Options • Protect functioning of public land ecosystems through monitoring and enforcement • Adopt a user pay to extract resources on public lands • Institute fair compensation for resources • Require responsibility for any user who damages or alters public lands • Adopt uneven aged forestry management • Include ecological services of trees in estimating value • Reduce road building into uncut lands and require restoration plans for areas currently used

3. Land Conservation Options • Coordinate with forest service to leave fallen trees to promote nutrient cycling • Grow timber in longer rotations • Reduce or eliminate clear-cutting, sheltered wood cutting, or seed tree cutting on sloped land • Rely on more sustainable tree cutting methods • Reduce fragmentation of remaining large forests • Require certification of lumber that is cut according to sustainable practices • Use sustainable techniques in tropical forests • Create solutions to urban land use problems including zoning.

4. Conservation vocab • Preservation or sustainable: to keep or maintain intact • Ex. Land trusts • Remediation: to act or process of correcting a fault or deficiency • Ex: cleaning up from Exxon Valdez or Deep Water horizon oil spills • Mitigation: to moderate or alleviate in force and intensity • Ex: Road reflectors to make deer freeze before entering a road • Restoration: to restore to its former good condition • Ex: removing a dam

5. Mining

6. Over view of mining

7. Steps of mining • Exploration: looking for areas that contain desired resources • Site Development: take samples to determine quality and quantity of material; construct roads and bring in equipment • Extraction: Removing the material from the ground • Processing: Valuable material is extracted from the ore

8. Types of mining • Surface mining: soil and rock over resource is removed to gain access to material underneath • Enlarged until deposit is exhausted or costs become to high

9. Types of surface mining • Strip mining: area stripped is fairly flat; take from a large area Ex: tar sands • Open pit mining: removal of materials from an open air pit Ex: diamonds • Mountaintop removal mining: all rock and soil above seam is removed and placed in valleys Ex: Coal • Dredging: collecting soil from bottom of the sea • Highwall mining: uses continuous mining machine under remote control to remove material Ex: coal

10. Types of mining • Underground mining: large shafts dug into earth to remove material • Less surface damage • Can lead to acidification of ground water after mine is abandoned • in situ leaching: small holes drilled into site and water based chemical solvents are used to extract minerals

11. Processing • Removes usable materials from ore • Involves heat and/or chemicals

12. Global Reserves • 2 billion tons of minerals are extracted and used each year in the US • US imports 50% of the most needed minerals • US, Germany, and Russia are 8% of the population but use 75% of most widely used metals

13. Relevant Laws • General Mining Law (1872): grants free access to individuals and corporations to prospect for minerals in public domain and allows them, upon making a discovery, to stake a claim on that deposit • Mineral Leasing Act (1920): authorizes and governs leasing of public lands form developing deposits of coal, petroleum, natural gas and other hydrocarbons, phosphates, and sodium • Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (1977): Established a program for regulating surface coal mining and reclamation activities

14. Fishing

15. Fishing Techniques • Bottom trawling • Drift Net • Long Line • Purse Seine • Terms: • Target/ commercial species: the species that are being sought in the fishing • Bycatch: animals caught that are not the target species

16. Bottom trawling • Use a funnel-shaped net to drag the ocean bottom • Target Species: • Cod • Flounder • Scallops

17. Drift Net • Long Expanses of nets that hang down in the water • Traps: turtles, sea birds, marine mammals • 1992 UN voluntary ban on drift nets longer than 1.5 mi • Ghost fishing

18. Longline • Place very long lines with thousands of baited hooks • Target species: swordfish, tuna, sharks, halibut, cod • Bycatch: sea turtles, pilot whales, dolphins

19. Purse Seine • Surrounds school of fish spotted with aircraft with a large net which is drawn tight • Target species: tuna, mackerel, anchovies, herring • Bycatch: dolphins, sea turtles

20. Overfishing • Oceans supply 1% of all human food and 10% of world’s protein source • China responsible for 1/3 of all fishing • 1/3 are used for non-consumption • Fish oil • Fish meal • Animal feed • 1/3 of global catches are bycatch • discarded • Maximum sustained yield = largest amount of marine organisms that can be harvested without causing a population crash

21. Overfishing

22. Techniques to Sustainably Managing Fisheries • Regulate locations and numbers of fish farms and monitor their pollution output • Encourage the production of herbivorous fish species • Require and enforce labeling of fish products that were raised of caught according to sustainable methods • Set catch limits far below maximum sustainable yields • Eliminate government subsidies for commercial fishing

23. Techniques to Sustainably Managing Fisheries • Prevent importation of fish from foreign countries that do not adhere to sustainable-harvesting methods. • Place trading sanctions on foreign countries that do not adhere to sustainable-harvesting methods • Assess fees for harvesting fish and shellfish from public waters • Increase the number of marine sanctuaries and no-fishing areas

24. Techniques to Sustainably Managing Fisheries • Increase penalties for fishing techniques that do not allow escape of bycatch, including unwanted fish species, marine mammals, sea birds, and sea turtles • Ban the throwing back of bycatch • Monitor and destroy invasive species transported through ship ballast

25. How to restore freshwater fish habitat • Planting native vegetation on stream banks • Rehabilitating in-stream habitats • Controlling erosion • Controlling invasive species • Restoring fish passages around human made-impediments • Monitoring, regulating, and enforcing recreational and commercial fishing • Protecting costal estuaries and wetlands

26. Aquaculture • (or mariculture) = fish farming • Growing commercial species for food • Involves: • Stocking • Feeding • Protection from predators • Harvesting

27. Aquaculture • Industry growing by 6% annually • Provides 5% of world’s total food production • Most in less-developed countries • Products: • Seaweeds • Kelp = 75% • Mollusks = 80% • Mussels • Oysters • Shrimp = 40% • Salmon • Trout • Catfish

28. Advantages • Cold blooded animals convert more feed to useable protein • Requires less feed than livestock systems • For every hectare of ocean oyster farming can produce 58,000 kg of protein • Harvesting oysters = 10kg

29. Requirements • Species must be marketable • Inexpensive to raise • Trophically efficient • Marketable to size at 1 – 2 years • Disease resistant

30. Disadvantages • Industrial aquaculture posses a threat to marine and coastal biological diversity • Creates wide-scale destruction and degradation of natural habitats • Leaves nutrients and antibiotics as aquaculture waste • Accidental release of alien or modified species into native waters • Transmission of disease to wild stocks • Displacement of local indigenous human communities

31. Case Study – Salmon Farming • 22% of all retail seafood • Farmed salmon have more PCBs than any other protein source • Fattened with fish meal and fish oils high in PCBs • PCB = polychlorinated biphenyls • Banned in US in 1970’s – persistent pollutants • Cause cancer and fetal development effects • Farmed salmon contains 52% more fat that wild caught salmon

32. Relevant Laws • Anadromous Fish Conservation Act (1965): authorizes Sectary of the Interior to enter into agreements to conserve, develop, and enhance anadromous fish resources in the US. • Anadromous = fish that migrate from the sea to fresh water to spawn • Example: Salmon

33. Relevant Laws • Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act (1976): • Governs marine fisheries in US federal waters • Aside in development of domestic fishing industry by phasing out foreign fishing • Manage fisheries • Promote conservation • Created eight regional fishery management councils • 1996 amendments focused on rebuilding overfished fisheries, protecting essential fish habitat, reducing bycatch

34. Relevant Laws • United Nations Treaty on the Law of the Sea (1982): • Defines rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world’s oceans • Establishes guidelines for businesses, the environment, and management of marine resources

35. Global Economics

36. Global Economy and the environment • The environment contains resources that can be used in the economy • Use of resources contains new environmental issues • Increased economic activity improves standards of living • Until recently development of economies and local environments were seperate

37. World Bank • Source of financial and technical assistance to the developing world • Owned by 184 member countries • Provides low interest loans, interest-free credit, and grants to developing countries to improve education, health, infrastructure, communications, and environmental issues • In 2001 endorsed a strategy to focus on environmental issues

38. World bank environmental projects • $13.8 billion in areas of biodiversity, conservation, climate change, and international waters • $740 million to phase out ozone-depleting substances • $1.6 billion into projects that reduce green house gas emisions

39. “Tragedy of the Commons” • Overuse of common/public land leads to: • Uncontrolled human population growth • Air pollution • Over extraction of ground water and wasting water due to excessive irrigation • Frontier logging of old growth forests and slash and burn • Habitat destruction • Poaching • overfishing

40. Limits to “Tragedy of the Commons” • Economic decisions are short term while environmental consequences are long term • Land that is privately owned is subject to market pressure • Some commons are easier to control than others • Incorporating discount rates into the valuation of resources would be an incentive for investors to bear a short-term cost for a long-term gain • Breaking commons into smaller, privately owned parcels fragments government policies • Different standards and practices may affect one parcel differently than others

41. Names to know • Rachel Carson: Wrote Silent Spring lead to ban on DDT • Aldo Leopold: book A Sand county Almanac. Developed environmental ethics • John Muir: Founded Sierra Club and helped save many wilderness areas • Theodore Roosevelt: 26 president setting aside land for national forests, wildlife refuges, developing farmlands, and advocating for protecting wild spaces • Henry David Thoreau: book Walden discussed materialism and need for conservation